The Zodiac Wheel and the Human Soul

Here's a new video which explores one of the most important aspects of the celestial foundation of the world's ancient sacred mythologies and scriptures: the annual cycle delineated by the solstices & equinoxes, and subdivided further by the great circle of the zodiac wheel.

This video illustrates the celestial mechanics which cause the "background stars" to cycle through Aries, Taurus, Gemini, Cancer, Leo, Virgo and the rest . . . and then shows how that wheel created by this heavenly motion underlies so many of the ancient myths and stories in the world's sacred scriptures and oral traditions, and what it might mean.

Much of this information will already be familiar to regular visitors to this blog or readers of The Undying Stars, but I hope that this new visual discussion (including the animations using  the open-source planetarium application stellarium.org) will help make it "crystal clear." 

Ultimately, the great circle and its cross of solstices and equinoxes can be seen materializing in different forms in virtually every myth and sacred tradition around our planet -- in order to convey the same message of profound ancient knowledge about the nature of human life in this material-spiritual universe, entrusted to humanity as an ancient treasure in the precious esoteric allegories that animate the mythology of the world . . .

The Bible is about the mystery of human life. Instead of relating to the incidents of a remote epoch in temporal history, it deals with the reality of the living present in the life of every soul on earth.

                               -- Alvin Boyd Kuhn, The Stable and the Manger

image: Wikimedia commons (link). 

Easter: the Birth-Day of the Gods

image: Wikimedia commons (link).

When we begin to realize that virtually every single story in the scriptures of the Old and New Testaments of the Bible, from Genesis to Revelation, is built upon celestial allegory -- especially if we have taken them literally for years, even decades -- it can at first feel like this knowledge "ruins" the great annual festivals that we once understood as commemorations of literal-historical events.

Especially the holidays of Christmas and Easter can suddenly feel strangely alien to us, because their celebration has been for so long promoted and controlled almost exclusively by those who insist upon celebrating these holidays as literal and historical, to the point that we "concede ownership" and unconsciously  adopt the mindset that the primary meaning of these annual events belongs to those who take them literally.

The unspoken assumption, if we were to put it into words or conscious thought (which we rarely ever do) is that these holidays have the most meaning for the literalists, and the idea that neither Christmas nor Easter has anything to do with literal, historical events which took place on planet Earth (although they can be shown to have taken place in the circling stars of the sky, and in fact are still taking place there, over and over each year) would be an unwelcome intrusion best kept quiet lest it "diminish" the meaning and sacredness of these special days. 

But what if, in fact, it is the literalist-historicist approach which is actually intruding upon the meaning of holidays such as Christmas and Easter?

What if the insistence upon seeing these stories as episodes in the life of someone else, no matter how revered and holy that one is, and no matter how well-intentioned we are in this insistence, actually ends up subverting their original meaning -- to the point that they are assumed to teach something that is almost "180-degrees out" from what they were originally intended to teach? 

Just such a radical assertion is argued by Alvin Boyd Kuhn in an essay entitled Easter: the Birthday of the Gods, and backed up by some of the clearest explanation found in any of Kuhn's thousands of pages of writing regarding the meaning and the purpose of the esoteric allegorical system which underlies the sacred scriptures and mythologies of the human race.

This blog has previously presented literally dozens of examples from the Old and New Testament scriptures which point very strongly to the conclusion that these stories, in common with other myths from all around the world, are esoteric in nature and that they are all united by a shared system of celestial metaphor as well as by a shared "shamanic-holographic" vision of this universe and our human experience within this earthly existence.

This shared esoteric, shamanic, and celestial foundation actually unites all of the world's sacred traditions, even as those who insist upon literalistic and historical interpretations of the scriptures almost invariably use their literalistic approach to divide humanity (generally into the two groups of "those who also interpret our scriptures our way" and "everyone else"). This fact in-and-of-itself gives us a hint that the literalistic approach tends to completely invert the conclusions reached by the esoteric approach and that it tends to wind up with conclusions that are "upside down" from the esoteric understanding.

It thus becomes very important to understand whether or not the world's ancient texts are actually literal, or if they are esoteric, and the two different approaches will lead to two very different understandings of the meanings of the stories themselves, and the meanings of the annual days associated with the different parts of the stories.

In Easter: the Birthday of the Gods (which can be read online in slightly less-than-complete form here and here, but which is so clearly and succinctly argued that everyone interested in these subjects might want to consider obtaining an actual physical copy for his or her own collection), Alvin Boyd Kuhn powerfully explains his view that all the world's scriptures and sacred stories are in fact esoteric, and his belief regarding the reason that the ancients chose to use metaphors from the natural world (to include the majestic cycles of the heavenly spheres) in order to convey their esoteric teachings.

On page 27 out of 31 in the second of the two online versions of Kuhn's Easter essay linked in the preceding paragraph, he writes -- speaking of those who gave the world their various ancient sacred traditions (whom he generally refers to as "the Sages" in all of his books and analysis) --

[. . .] those venerable Sages never wrote religious books in the form of veridical personal or national history. What they essayed to write was embalmed in forms of suggestive typist, such as myth, allegory, drama, number graphs and astrological pictography. By these methods they put forth the great truths of life and consciousness in forms of representation that would eternally adumbrate their reality to the human mind, however dull. Knowing that the essence of spiritual experience and the mind's realization of high truth are things that can not be expressed or conveyed by words alone, in fact never are fully communicable by language, they resorted to the only method that can impress true meaning even unconsciously on the brain. Every natural object and phenomenon in the living world is an objective pictograph of an elemental truth. Every object in nature mirrors a cosmic or spiritual truth. Man needs but to gaze at and reflect upon outer nature to find glyphs of the basic principles of knowledge appertaining to a higher world and level of consciousness. The laws and ordinances of spirit are adumbrated in nature's operations and spectacles.

The word "adumbrated" comes from the Latin word for "shadows" -- umbra -- along with the prefix "ad-" which means "toward" or "ahead of" and thus literally "foreshadowing" or "pre-shadowing" or (more expansively) "conveying ideas to us through shadows or representations or 'magic-lantern shows' so that we will grasp them through the 'fore-shadowing,' rather than trying to explain them to the mind in words, which does not work for some types of deep spiritual truths or concepts."

In other words, Alvin Boyd Kuhn is here expressing an idea which was also put forth in the writings of the esoteric scholar R. A. Schwaller de Lubicz, who asserted that the ancients did not use "esoterism" in order to hide truths, but rather in order to convey them! In a short but extremely helpful little book entitled Esoterism and Symbol (first published in French in 1960 as Propos sur Esoterisme et Symbole and translated into a first US edition in 1985), Schwaller begins his discussion with the proclamation:

Esoterism has no common measure with deliberate concealment of the truth, that is, with secrecy in the conventional sense of the term. [page 1; italics in the original].

Having told us what it is not for, Schwaller does not, however, proceed to tell us exactly what esoterism is for, in so many words . . . but as we follow his discussion throughout the rest of the book we realize that Schwaller is showing us that esoterism is designed to convey something he calls "intelligence-of-the-heart," which cannot be conveyed through the methods normally used for the purposes of "cerebral intelligence." The entire category of spiritual truths, Schwaller argues, were seen by the ancients as of a nature that is qualitatively different from anything that "cerebral intelligence" is able to grasp -- and that the esoteric was employed in order to impress these great truths upon the "intelligence-of-the-heart," bypassing the mechanism of the cerebral intelligence, which has its own proper sphere for which it is very useful but which becomes an actual obstacle when it comes to matters of spirit.

Schwaller writes:

Spirit is found only with spirit, and esoterism is the spiritual aspect of the world, inaccessible to cerebral intelligence. 3.

This is what Alvin Boyd Kuhn is also saying in the passage quoted above, in which he says that the ancient Sages used "myth, allegory, drama, number graphs and astrological pictography" in order to "eternally adumbrate their reality to the human mind, however dull." He is not, I believe, talking about some human minds being more or less dull than others, but rather saying that there is an aspect of human mind, in all of us, which is inherently dull when it comes to matters of spiritual understanding -- the aspect of our mind which Schwaller de Lubicz calls our "cerebral intelligence."

The cerebral intelligence has its place -- it is, indeed, an essential tool that we need every day of our lives -- but it "chokes" on certain types of learning.

This is exactly why, for example, Mr. Miyagi in the original Karate Kid chooses to teach Daniel-San through the unforgettable "wax-on, wax-off" method, in what may well be the best cinematic representation of the concept of "the esoteric" ever put into a movie -- and why martial arts are traditionally passed on through exactly this type of "esoteric" methodology. If Mr. Miyagi had instead tried to teach Daniel by sitting him down and explaining the angles of the arm and elbow and shoulder and body needed in order to stop a charging opponent's punch, Daniel-san's "cerebral intelligence" would have "choked" on the explanation, and spit it back out, and started firing off all kinds of questions about "what if this" and "what if that" and "will this really work" and "what about this other?"

Alvin Boyd Kuhn says that "the essence of spiritual experience and the mind's realization of high truth are things that can not be expressed or conveyed by words alone, in fact never are fully communicable by language." Instead, the esoteric is in fact "the only method that can impress true meaning even unconsciously on the brain."

And here we begin to perceive the reason that taking stories and rituals which are intended to be understood esoterically and instead turning our intelligence loose on them as if they are supposed to be understood as literal and historical events for us to analyze can lead us to do more than just "miss the point" of their esoteric significance: it can lead us to come up with a completely different conclusion altogether, and one which in fact undermines and even totally reverses the message that the stories are trying to convey.

And this, says Alvin Boyd Kuhn, appears to be exactly what has happened with the sacred myths collected in the books which make up what we call today "the Bible," and in particular with the Easter story.

And that terrible misinterpretation, Kuhn argues, is made infinitely more serious when we consider the wonderful truths which the Easter story is intended to convey -- for Kuhn has an extremely "high view" of the spiritual meaning of the Easter story, to the point that he says that when we grasp what it is telling us, words fall short and "the one remaining mode of expressing the profundity and the majesty of our uplift is song" (from page 2 of the version linked previously).

For, the Easter story as found in the stories of the so-called "New Testament" (which themselves are but a "re-casting" of the same themes found in slightly different form in the sacred mythology of ancient Egypt, and found in many other forms in the other sacred scriptures and myths of other cultures literally across the globe) expresses a very specific point in the cycles experienced by each and every human soul.

According to Alvin Boyd Kuhn's analysis:

Easter is the ceremonial that crowns all the other religious festivals of the year with its springtime halo of resurrected life. It is to dramatize the final end in the victory of man's long struggle through the inferior kingdoms of matter and bodily incarnation in grades of fleshly existence. Other festivals around the year memorialize the various stages of this slow progress through the recurring round of the cycles of manifestation. Easter commemorates the end in triumph, all lower obstacles overcome, all "enemies" conquered, all darkness of ignorance vanquished, all fruits and the golden harvest of developed powers garnered in the eternal barn of an inner holy of holies of consciousness, all battles won, peace with aeonal victory assured at last. 3.

In other words, he argues, it refers to a point towards which we all are working in our successive visits into this realm of incarnation, this realm in which our spirit-nature is "planted in" our physical nature as a seed is planted in the earth, in order to grow: it "adumbrates" that point when the work of such cycles of incarnation is complete, and the soul triumphantly soars into an entirely new realm of consciousness.

If all that seems just a little too much to swallow (if, in other words, the "cerebral intelligence" chokes upon encountering such assertions), Kuhn in this essay Easter: the Birthday of the Gods provides what may be the best, succinct explanation found anywhere in his extensive writings of the way that the esoteric celestial allegories found throughout the world's mythologies (and operating quite clearly in the Easter story, as discussed in the previous post about the zodiacal symbolism in the gospel accounts of the Triumphal Entry into Jerusalem and the Betrayal by Judas Iscariot).

As you read through the extended quotation reproduced below from pages 4 and 5 of Kuhn's essay on Easter, you can follow along on the now-familiar zodiac wheel discussed in countless previous posts (see for instance here, here, here and here), which is arranged such that the June solstice (summer solstice for the northern hemisphere) is at the top or "twelve o'clock" position on the wheel (in between the signs of Gemini and Cancer, in the Age of Aries used in so many surviving ancient mythologies including those in the Old and New Testaments of the Bible), and the fall equinox is at "three o'clock" (between Virgo and Libra), the winter solstice is at "six o'clock" (between Sagittarius and Capricorn), and the glorious spring equinox after which Easter is celebrated (as is Passover from the Old Testament, both commemorations representing the successful crossing of the lower half of the year, which symbolized the physical incarnation here in this body of earth and water).

Both of the important equinoxes are marked with a red "X," because at the equinoxes the sun's ecliptic (along with the sun and also -- generally speaking -- all of the visible planets appear to travel) crosses over the celestial equator, and as it crosses either "down below" this line or back "up above" this line, the days either change over to being shorter than the nights (on the way "down" to the winter solstice) or to being longer (on the way back "up" towards the top of the year):

And here now is Alvin Boyd Kuhn's explanation of the esoteric or spiritual use to which the "venerable Sages" who gave the sacred stories to the various cultures of humanity employed the above awe-inspiring annual cycle:

Using solar symbolism and analogues in depicting the divine soul's peregrinations round the cycles of existence, the little sun of radiant spirit in man being the perfect parallel of the sun in the heavens, and exactly copying its movements, the ancient Sages marked the four cardinal "turns" of its progress round the zodiacal year as epochal stages in soul evolution. As all life starts with conception in mind, later to be extruded into physical manifestation, so the soul that is to be the god of a human being is conceived in the divine mind at the station in the zodiac marking the date of June 21. This is at the "top" of the celestial arc, where mind is most completely detached from matter, meditating in all its "purity."

Then the swing of the movement begins to draw it "downward" to give it the satisfaction of its inherent yearning for the Maya of experience which alone can bring its latent capabilities for the evolution of consciousness to manifestation. Descending the from June it reaches September 21, the point where its direction becomes straight downward and it here crosses the line of separation between spirit and matter, the great Egyptian symbolic line of the "horizon," and becomes incarnated in material body. Conceived in the aura of Infinite Mind in June, it enters the realm of mortal flesh in September. It is born then as the soul of a human; but at first and for a long period it lies like a seed in the ground before germination, inert, unawakened, dormant, in the relative sense of the word, "dead." This is the young god lying in the manger, asleep in his cradle of the body, or as in the Jonah-fish allegory and the story of Jesus in the boat in the storm on the lake, asleep in the "hold" of the "ship" of life, with the tempest of the body's elemental passions raging all about him. He must be awakened, arise, exert himself and use his divine powers to still the storm, for the elements in the end will obey his mighty will.

Once in the body, the soul power is weighed in the scales of the balance, for the line of the border of the sign of Libra, the Scales, runs across the September equinoctial station. For soul is now equilibrated with body and out of this balance come all the manifestations of the powers of consciousness. It is soul's immersion in body and its equilibration with it that brings consciousness to function.

Then on past September, like any seed sown in the soil, the soul entity sinks its roots deeper and deeper into matter, for at its later stages of growth it must be able to utilize the energy of matter's atomic force to effectuate its ends for its own spiritual aggrandizement. It is itself to be lifted up to heights of cosmic consciousness, but no more than an oak can exalt its majestic form to highest reaches without the dynamic energization received from the dart at its feet can soul rise up above body without drawing forth the strength of the body's dynamo of power. Down, down it descends then through the October, November, and December path of the sun, until it stands at the nadir of its descent on December 21.

Here it has reached the turning-point, at which the energies that were stored potentially in it in seed form will feel the first touch of quickening power and will begin to stir into activity. At the winter solstice of the cycle the process of involution of spirit into matter comes to a stand-still -- just what the solstice means in relation to the sun -- and while apparently stationary in its deep lodgment in matter, like moving water locked up in winter's ice, it is slowly making the turn as on a pivot from outward and downward direction to movement at first tangential, then more directly upward to its high point in spirit home. So the winter solstice signalizes the end of "death" and the rebirth of life in a new generation. It therefore was inevitably named as the time of the "birth of the Divine Sun" in man; the Christ-mas, the birthday of the Messianic child of spirit. The incipient resurgence of the new growth, now based on and fructified by roots struck deep in matter, begins at this "turn of the year," as the Old Testament phrases it, and goes on with increasing vigor as, like the lengthening days of late winter, the sun-power of the spiritual light bestirs into activity the latent capabilities of life and consciousness, and the hidden beauty of the spirit breaks through the confining soil of body and stands out in fulness of its divine expression on the morn of March 21. This brings the soul in a burst of glorious light out of the tomb of fleshly "death," giving it verily its "resurrection from the dead." It then has consummated its cycle's work by bursting through the gates of death and hell, and marches in triumph upward to become a lord of life in higher spheres of the cosmos. No longer is it to be a denizen of lower worlds, a prisoner chained in body's dungeon pit, a soul nailed to matter's cross. It has conquered mortal decay and rises on wings of ecstasy into the freedom of eternal life. Its trysting with earthly clay is forever ended, as aloft it sweeps like a lark storming heaven's gate, with "hymns of victory" pouring from its exuberant throat. From mortality it has passed the bright portals into immortality. From man it has become god. No more shall it enter the grim underworld of "death." 4-5.

These are incredible concepts, but there is little doubt that Kuhn's analysis as outlined above must be considered a very defendable explanation of the insistent personification of the "stations" of the great zodiac wheel, found in virtually every single ancient sacred tradition of the human race, on every continent of our planet and indeed on all the scattered islands of the great Pacific and other oceans as well, and that it may in fact be the reason why those unknown ancient Sages chose to employ it, and what they intended us to understand from these stories.

And, although Kuhn himself does not go this far, I can show you to my complete satisfaction (and I believe to yours as well) that it is equally evident that the events depicted in the Easter week contain this very cycle in its entirety, from the

• Triumphal Entry at the beginning of the week, replete with imagery of the top of the zodiac wheel, to the 
• Agony of Christ and the Crucifixion "outside the gates" of the city -- that is, at the point of the fall equinox, which is one of the two "gates" of the year through which the sun and all the visible planets must pass as they "cross over" the line of the celestial equator and descend down into the lower half of the year (or back up, at the other equinox), and which represents the throwing down of the soul into the "grave" of the incarnate body, to cross through this incarnate life in which we are all struggling on this earthly surface, and finally turning back upwards to the
• Resurrection and the "rising up" out of the lower realm, which takes place on the other side of the year at the spring equinox, which is replete with imagery that has to do with both the fish of Pisces and the lambs and ram of Aries, and which represents the ultimate triumph of the soul, after the lessons and necessary consciousness-raising that take place during the cycles of incarnation in the "underworld" of this material realm.

Obviously, in the Easter week series of stories, the one point of the wheel which is not really emphasized is the point of the "birth of the Christ-consciousness," which is emphasized at a different special celebration on the annual calendar: at the sun's turning-point back upwards after the winter solstice, which is celebrated as Christmas. But the starting point of the summer solstice (in the Triumphal Entry and the "Upper Room"), followed by the "casting down" point of the fall equinox (with the Crucifixion) and the "raising up" point of the spring equinox (Resurrection) are all very clearly depicted and emphasized.

Now, in the above extended quotation of the passage found on pages 4 and 5 of Alvin Boyd Kuhn's Easter thesis, when he speaks of "the divine soul" or "the soul entity" or even "the soul power," he is referring to the individual soul of each and every person. He is not referring to something outside of any one of us: an examination of the bulk of Kuhn's work makes it abundantly clear that he believes that those who gave us the sacred stories intended for us to understand that they are not about ancient men, women, heroes or demigods, but that they are about each and every reader or hearer of the story: the "star" of every story is in fact your own soul.

In a different passage from a different essay by Alvin Boyd Kuhn, quoted at the end of this post from the time of the winter solstice, he writes:

Bible stories are in no sense a record of what happened to a man or a people as historical occurrence. As such they would have little significance for mankind. They would be the experience of people not ourselves, and would not bear a relation to life. But they are a record, under pictorial forms, of that which is ever occurring in the reality of the present in all lives. They mean nothing as outward events; but they mean everything as picturizations of that which is our living experience at all times. The actors are not old kings, priests and warriors; the one actor in every portrayal, in every scene, is the human soul.

Therefore, Kuhn asserts, we will necessarily go astray if we "externalize" or literalize the sacred myths: they must be grasped by, and applied to, each and every person for himself or herself.

And this again is where, according to Kuhn in the essay Easter: the Birthday of the Gods (and according to quotations which Kuhn brings in to his essay from psychologist and scholar of mythology Carl Jung, who says the very same thing), the externalization of the Bible stories, and their use to encourage the veneration of a supposed external and historical-literal figure -- even a figure so admirable as the figure of Jesus in the gospels -- can lead us seriously astray, to the point where we not only miss the actual message of the story but end up with a message that is directly opposite from the original esoteric message.

Because, as Kuhn discusses in the extended quotation cited above, during the discussion of the September equinox and the "casting down" into the Balance of Libra and the reawakening of divine consciousness at the nadir-point of winter solstice, our sojourn in the incarnate body is a time of our own soul's passing through the "Scales" between the horizons, and of our own need to awaken the higher divine spark of consciousness within: not a time to look at the external stories and conclude that someone else has passed through the balance for us and awakened consciousness so that we don't have to!

And yet, that is exactly how the stories are interpreted by the majority of the literalist-historicist camp, lo these past seventeen centuries: the one in the stories has done those things, so that we don't have to.  

It is exactly, if I might bring in some films which did not appear until long after Kuhn wrote this essay, someone were to watch the movie The Matrix(1999) or The Truman Show (1998), and conclude: "I'm sure glad that Neo took that Red Pill -- so that I don't have to!" or "I'm so happy for Truman, that he finally 'woke up' and walked out of that 'dome of illusion' -- now I don't have to!"

Such a response would undoubtedly confuse the creators of those films -- because the whole point of the movie is that you, the viewer, need to consider waking up like Truman to the illusionists manipulating the world within the dome, or waking up like Neo to the illusion of the Matrix.

The point is not to curl up inside your "pod" in the Matrix -- or inside your little house in the dome -- and say, "I'm sure glad Truman, or Neo, woke up for me!" And the makers of those movies would probably be both surprised and dismayed if everyone interpreted their films that way.

According to Alvin Boyd Kuhn, we are not at the point described by the Easter symbolism just yet: we are still on the Scales of the Balance, down here in this mortal existence: and what we do here has an enormous impact on the progress of our invisible soul. As he says elsewhere, everything we are doing "down here" in the body is making its mark upon the record of the mighty Scales, as depicted in many "vignettes" or scenes in the ancient Egyptian Book of the Dead, whose correct name as Kuhn notes in the Easter essay is in fact the Book of Going Forth by Day, envisaging the future point of Easter and the soul's "Day-Break" of triumph (scene from the Book of the Dead of the scribe-priest Ani is depicted below).

The danger of the literalist misinterpretation, in Kuhn's opinion, can be seen in the "dismal" record of literalist Christianity down through the centuries since it took hold, and since the tragic triumph of literalism over esoterism during the second and third centuries "A.D.": seventeen centuries of "bigotry, superstition, persecution, hatred, war and the most fiendish inhumanity ever to be entered into the world's annals" (Easter, 16).

Ultimately, Kuhn argues in this essay, the question of whether Easter is about what the literalists say it is about, or whether it is meant to depict one of the most glorious parts of the esoteric teaching outlined above thus becomes an incredibly important question. He says, as he draws towards his conclusion,

Easter meaning and Easter ecstasy will forever elude us if we can not understand it as the drama, not of one man's history long passed [. . .] but of our own life history, the scenario of our transfiguration yet to come. [. . .] if we for a moment permit it to lure us into the belief that another man's alleged conquest of death in the long past in any degree relieves us of the evolutionary task of achieving our own resurrection, the myth becomes the source of a tragic psychological calamity for us. For to the extent we look to a man, or a miracle, or any power outside ourselves, to that extent we will let the sleeping divinity within us lie unawakened. 28-29. 

And thus, it may well be that -- far from being those with an esoteric understanding of Easter (or Christmas) who are intruding upon holy ground that "belongs to" those who take these stories literally -- it is the literalist-historicist approach that has in fact intruded upon, and thrown over, the ancient sacred meaning of these significant annual days of commemoration.

To the extent that this overthrow has led to the teaching of something entirely the opposite of what the sacred stories were actually intended to teach, this is a tragic mistake that calls out to be remedied. It is very similar to the way that the stories of Adam and Eve or of Shem, Ham and Japheth

have both been used to divide humanity and pit men and women against one another, even though if these are understood as the esoteric celestial allegories which I believe they can be shown to be, they actually teach a message that should unite men and women instead of dividing them. 

And, to the extent that this overthrow has led to "persecution, hatred, war and the most fiendish inhumanity," the question of which understanding of Easter is a twisting of the message to mean the opposite of what it was intended becomes a very important question, and not a "merely academic" question at all.

If the esoteric understanding outlined above is closer to the intention of the "ancient Sages" who gave these sacred treasures to humanity so many millennia ago, as I believe that it is, then it is a very dangerous thing for the majority of the people to conclude that they can just "curl up in their pod in the Matrix," because Neo already woke up and achieved consciousness so that I don't have to.

Alvin Boyd Kuhn argues that Easter is one of the most beautiful symbols in all of the New Testament version of the esoteric myths. I believe that when we understand it esoterically, it actually becomes even more beautiful, and more meaningful for our lives, than ever.

image: Wikimedia commons (link).

Star Myths in the New Testament: the Visit of the Magi

CAUTION: The above video examines powerful evidence that the scriptures of the New Testament gospel accounts are based upon a system of celestial allegory rather than being accounts of literal terrestrial historical events. If you are not comfortable exploring this subject, please consider refraining from watching.

Here is a new video exploring the events described in the Gospel According to Matthew, chapter 2: the Visit of the Magi.

It asks a question which I believe poses a king-sized problem for the "literal-historical" school of scriptural interpretation: If the wise men described in Matthew 2:1 came "from the east to Jerusalem," but then explain that they "saw his star in the east" in Matthew 2:2 (which "stood over where the young child was," according to Matthew 2:9), how did they ever end up arriving somewhere in the west of where they began?

If you start east of somewhere, and then see a star in the east which is your guide, it would seem that you would then travel towards the east.

Did the wise men of Matthew 2 first travel across China, then across the Pacific Ocean to the west coast of the Americas, then across the Americas to the Atlantic Ocean, and then continue east until they arrived at the point that the star directed?

The texts do not support a literal-historical-terrestrial understanding of the episode, unless you believe that the wise men as described in the text were among the ancient circumnavigators of the globe . . . but they work perfectly well for the celestial approach, as we will see.

Also, while it would seem that this is a subject that is more appropriate to examine around Christmas-time, it turns out that the events of the Easter-story actually incorporate the full cycle of the great wheel of the zodiac and the year, and thus a very comprehensive message regarding the journey of the human soul of every man and woman -- as future posts (and possibly future videos) may have occasion to explore!

The celestial analysis of the Star of Bethlehem and Visit of the Magi which underlies much of the discussion in this video was first given by Robert Taylor (1784 - 1844) in a lecture entitled "The Star of Bethlehem" which was published posthumously in a book entitled The Devil's Pulpit in 1857, which  is available online in its entirety here (see in particular pages 42 - 44).

image: Wikimedia commons (link). 

Fire and Water

Many previous posts have explored Alvin Boyd Kuhn's assertion that the central theme of the ancient scriptures and sacred stories of humanity is the message that we are beings of spirit, mysteriously infused into a body of matter -- "fire plunged down into water" -- and inhabiting a universe which itself appears to be material but is at every point intertwined with, and even projected from and constantly sustained by, an invisible realm of spirit.

Most recently we examined this vitally-important theme in a post honoring a famous personage born of the admixture of parents from the planet Vulcan (named for an ancient god of fire) and from the planet Earth (a planet famous for its great oceans of water), a personage who is perhaps best known for pronouncing words of blessing while holding up his hand in a gesture that recalls a specific symbol associated with divine fire.

The fact that specific symbols which we call "letters" or "glyphs," designed to preserve words and thoughts in written form (whether lined or brushed onto paper, or carved into stone or wood or metal) can themselves be designed to convey that central message regarding the nature of human existence and the nature of the dual physical-spiritual universe we inhabit is most remarkable, and most worthy of further consideration. Alvin Boyd Kuhn, in fact, explored that very aspect of the symbolic vessels of written language in an essay he gave entitled The Esoteric Structure of the Alphabet, which was published as a book and is still available in hardcopy version here (a facsimile of the original imprint), and online in its entirety here.

There, we find some of Kuhn's clearest statements of this theme, that "the vast body of ancient Scripture [by which he means the sacred wisdom found in all the world's sacred myths and teachings] discoursed on but one subject -- the descent of souls" (20), "the old basic story of divine fire plunging down into water" (30), "the immersion of fiery spiritual units of consciousness in their actual baptism in the water of physical bodies" (34), all for the purpose of undergoing experiences which would serve their "continued growth through the ranges and planes of expanding consciousness" (20).  

In addition, he argues that this essential message can be found "not only in the scripts of religion, however, but also in a wide variety of other modes of expression [. . .] -- in ancient art, in architecture, in myth-making, secret society ritual, dramatic scenario, music, mathematics, anthropological science, logic, rhetoric, philosophy, astronomy, astrology, semantics, psychology, festival ordinances, social ceremonies and throughout the warp and woof of life generally" (4).

Then he reflects on one other supremely important way in which the ancients conveyed this central theme of our dual spiritual and physical nature:

Now, perhaps the strangest of all the channels through which it was given expression, comes the momentous revelation that the sagacious genius of antiquity had even insinuated a form of its basic outline into the very structure of that ground-base of all literature, -- the alphabet. 4.

He then proceeds to unpack the ways that the actual form of the letters in the Hebrew, Greek, and especially the Latin alphabets (the latter being the one used, for example, on this blog to convey these thoughts) remind us that we are divine fire plunged down into physical bodies for the purpose of expanding consciousness.  

In this way, Kuhn argues, our own familiar letters, which we typically regard as nothing more than random shapes (when we even think about them at all) are actually pictures, depicting invisible ideas in symbolic form: symbolic metaphors, reminding us of spiritual reality in a world that often conspires to obscure it. 

"They are," he writes, "true ideograms" (5). 

Amazingly, there is an extremely ancient form of writing, still in use to this day by billions of people around the world and even (in slightly modified forms) across many different cultures and languages, which is well-known to be composed almost entirely of "true ideograms" -- the Chinese characters which remain one of the most widely-used systems of writing in the world today.

As most readers are already aware, in this system of writing and its close relatives, each complete character stands for a complete word or thought, rather than for a sound or "phoneme" the way the letters in alphabetical systems do (it is logographic rather than phonologic).

Amazingly enough, there is some evidence that the assertions Alvin Boyd Kuhn made about the alphabetical systems of writing may apply to the characters of Chinese, which after all are extremely ancient and were in use when the other systems he writes about were in use further to the west.

Most remarkable, perhaps, is the Chinese character for the word "fire" itself, shown at top, above. The symbol for "fire" consists of the symbol for "person," shown immediately below and clearly symbolic of the human form, with two added "sparks" on either side, in the form of small strokes that (like flames) are nearly vertical:

Person: 

人

Fire: 

火

The connection of the symbol for "fire" with the symbol for a person would appear to be conveying very much the same message that Alvin Boyd Kuhn finds encoded in the very shapes and "ideograms" of the letters of the Hebrew, Greek, and Latin alphabets.

It is a message that reminds us that we ourselves, as well as every single person we meet, are like stars who have come down to this lower realm of earth and water for a time: even though we cannot see it, we are each in contact at all times with the divine infinite and are constantly connected to the infinite realm, even though we are prone to forget it. This is the message and the reminder conveyed by the expression Namaste, and it is the heart of the blessing accompanied by the hand-gesture of the Hebrew letter shin, associated both with fire and with the sound of fire plunging into water.

But what of this "plunging down into water" -- why would spirit be subjected to immersion in this physical world of incarnation, and what purpose could it serve?

It would seem to be a question in which we all can be said to have some interest or personal involvement, seeing that it is probably (probably) safe to assume that all of us who are looking at this page are presently in an incarnate form.

And as it turns out, Alvin Boyd Kuhn has ventured to explore that difficult question as well. In his 1940 book Lost Light, he argues that this is in fact the very question with which Paul wrestled in his famous seventh chapter of the epistle to the Romans. We come down from the invisible realm of spirit into the incarnate material body ("the body of death," as Paul says) because of something which he calls "the Law." This has been reinterpreted very differently by traditional (literal) Christianity, but Kuhn argues that it is the mandate which brings us into the body for our own spiritual growth and blessing, as well as for the ultimate blessing of others and of all the material creation.

Beginning on page 170, explaining his argument that Paul was indicating concepts which go far beyond those taught by literalist Christianity when using the words "Law" and "sin" and "death," Alvin Boyd Kuhn writes of Paul's seventh of Romans:

In this chapter Paul concatenates the steps of a dialectical process which has not been understood in its deep meaning for theology. It is concerned with the relation of the three things: the law, sin and death. He asks: "Is the Law equivalent to sin?" And he replies that sin developed in us "under the Law." What is this mysterious Law that the Apostle harps on with such frequency? Theology has not possessed the resources for a capable answer, beyond the mere statement that it is the power of the carnal nature in man. It is that, in part; but the profounder meaning could not be gained without the esoteric wisdom -- which had been discarded. This Law -- St. Paul's bete noir -- is that cosmic impulsion which draws all spiritual entities down from the heights into the coils of matter in incarnation. It is the ever-resolving Wheel of Birth and Death, the Cyclic Law, the Cycle of Necessity. As every cycle of embodiment runs through seven sub-cycles or stages, it is the seven-coiled serpent of Genesis that encircles man in its folds.

Now, says the Mystery initiate [he means by "the Mystery initiate" none other than Paul himself], by the Law came sin, and by sin came death. [. . .] Sin is just the soul's condition of immersion or entanglement in the nature of the flesh. And happily much of its gruesome and morbid taint by the theological mind can be dismissed as a mistaken and needless gesture of ignorant pietism. [. . .]

[. . .] Paul even says that at one time he lived without the law himself; this was before "the command" came to him. And what was this command? Again theology has missed rational sense because it has lost ancient cosmologies and anthropologies [that is to say, "ancient understanding of the nature of the universe, or cosmologies," and "ancient understanding of the nature of human existence in this universe, or anthropologies"]. The "command" was the Demiurgus' order to incarnate. It is found in the Timaeus of Plato and Proclus' work on Plato's theology. Then the Apostle states the entire case with such clarity that only purblind benightedness of mind could miss it: "When the command came home to me, sin sprang to life, and I died; . . ." He means to say that sin sprang to life as he died, i. e,. incarnated. And then he adds the crowning utterance on this matter to be found in all sacred literature: "the command that meant life proved death to me." He explains further: "The command gave an impulse to sin, sin beguiled me and used the command to kill me." And he proceeds to defend the entire procedure of nature and life against the unwarranted imputations of its being all an evil miscarriage of beneficence: "So the Law at any rate is holy, the command is holy, just and for our good. Then did what was meant for my good prove fatal to me? Never. It was sin; sin resulted in death for me to make use of this good thing." 170 - 173.

In order to understand the above explication, remember that by death, Kuhn avers, Paul is referring to incarnation in this body. When Paul speaks of the "command" that was given "to kill me," Paul means "the command -- the Law -- by which I incarnated in this body." That is to say, the Law which plunged him down into this human body, composed as it is of seven-eighths water: the Law that submerged his undying soul of fire within a material form.

And note that Paul expressly declares that this Law which impels us into incarnation is a good thing (a point he makes very strongly, and in a manner which shows that he anticipated that his listeners or readers would be wondering if such an impulsion might not be a very bad thing, rather than a blessing). But, as Kuhn explains in other parts of his book, and especially in a discussion on pages 573 and 574 regarding Paul's letter to the Corinthians, Paul explains that "What you sow never comes to life unless it dies" (i.e., "unless it incarnates") -- and that our incarnation in these physical bodies of death is exactly parallel in terms of being necessary for our growth: "What is sown is mortal, what rises is immortal; sown inglorious, it rises in glory; sown in weakness, it rises in power; sown in an animal body, it rises in a spiritual body" (574).

Note that we previously saw compelling arguments offered by Gerald Massey which suggest that Paul was not teaching the same thing that the literalists were teaching and that they would later claim he was teaching as well -- and that in fact he seems to have been teaching almost the exact opposite.

It is worth re-reading the above-quoted passage in light of this new understanding of the terminology, for the concepts Kuhn is exploring (and that the writer known as Paul may have been asserting, so many centuries ago) are of tremendous importance.

In fact, it is worth going to Lost Light itself and reading the entire chapters surrounding the cited passages above. However, since the scope of this particular discussion is actually about the fact that the very elements of writing contain this same message of spirit-fire submerged in incarnation as if in water,  let us examine one more Chinese ideogram which seems to beautifully express its meaning in its symbolic composition: the character for "Law" itself (shown below).

image: Wikimedia commons (link).

The Chinese character for "Law" is a composite, with a compressed or abbreviated version of the symbol for "water" on the left-hand side, and the symbol for "to go" on the right (the symbol for "water" is here rendered as only three small individual strokes, almost three "dots").

Law: 

法

On even a non-esoteric level, the fact that the character for "Law" is composed of the characters for "water" and "go" is worthy of remark, for it seems to express the idea of the "law of nature," the law that causes water to seek the paths along which it "goes" or flows. To create laws out of harmony with such a concept would be to make laws that would attempt to go against "the flow of the universe" -- and thus the symbol seems to embody a message that law is part of nature and cannot really be altered by artificial constructs which people try to pass-off as "law" (a concept which was forcefully articulated by "natural law" proponent Lysander Spooner in the nineteenth century).

But, even beyond that message, this character for "Law" would appear to incorporate the teaching that Kuhn believes Paul (whom Kuhn calls "the Mystery initiate," the participant in the knowledge passed on from remote antiquity through the various Mysteries) was articulating: that it is the Law of the universe which sends us along our Way, into this body of incarnation -- the Law which plunges fire into water.

That which Paul calls "the Law" is none other than the "Way of Water," beautifully contained in the Chinese character for "Law" as well: Water-Go.

It is most remarkable to consider that our familiar alphabet is in fact composed of ideograms, and what's more of ideograms which express the same central truth that was conveyed by the myths and sacred texts of antiquity, and by the symbols of ancient architecture and the ancient understanding of the meaning and message of the stars.

It is even more remarkable to consider that the actual ideograms of the ancient Chinese characters appear in at least some significant cases to be expressing the same profound concepts.

It is a message which we are prone to forget, and that we must therefore remind ourselves, which may explain why it was incorporated into everyday greetings (such as Namaste) and into the sacred forms of writing.

Indeed, in many ways, writing itself is a metaphor, in that it is in a real sense invisible thought taking physical form -- and thus it pictures the truth of who we are and of what this entire physical universe is, at its heart: a projection or embodiment in physical form of beings and realities which actually exist or have their origins in the invisible world of spirit.

Whether in the body, or out of the body, I cannot tell: Paul, the Gnostic Opponent of Literalism

image: Wikimedia commons (link).

No one can accuse the author of the New Testament letters attributed to the man using the name "Paul" of displaying anything less than an ardent, burning desire to convey what he believed to be an absolutely urgent message.

However, when it comes to what that message actually was, there are some researchers who have built a very strong case which suggests that it may not mean "what you think it means."

They argue that Paul might actually have been trying to urgently and insistently convey an esoteric, anti-literal, broadly gnostic, and even shamanic message: one he identified as "the mystery, which was kept secret since the world began" (Romans 16:25), a mystery which he calls "the hidden wisdom" (1 Corinthians 2:7), and a mystery which was actually the very opposite of the literalistic interpretation of the scriptures that Paul is normally believed to be championing.

It was a mystery which even Paul himself indicated would be opposed by clever and deceitful men, opponents he believed would not be above altering his letters to make them seem to say something different from what he was really trying to say, or even forging letters purporting to be from him, in order to keep the truth that he was urgently trying to teach from getting out.

In the previous post, we explored some of the penetrating insights and connections offered by Peter Kingsley in his 1999 text, In the Dark Places of Wisdom, providing evidence that ancient philosophy actually relied upon inspiration obtained by entering into a state of incubation or trance, contrary to the understanding of ancient philosophy commonly advanced by most conventional academics today.

It was the suppression of such techniques of ecstasy, of the ability to journey to the invisible realm with which we are all in fact inwardly connected at all times, the realm of non-ordinary reality, or non-local reality, along with the suppression of the knowledge of the indispensability of such travel, which ultimately led -- according to Dr. Kingsley's thesis -- to the incessant pursuit of satisfaction through external sources (whether materialistic or spiritual) that became the defining feature of "western civilization."

That preceding post offered a series of what I believe to be some of the most striking and revealing quotations from In the Dark Places of Wisdom, including some of the words with which ancient accounts tried to describe and convey the characteristics of this vitally-important state of coming into contact with the other realm (a concept often described today using the word "shamanic," which Peter Kingsley's book also uses).

As Peter Kingsley (who is a professional scholar in this field) describes it, the ancient inscriptions and texts tell us that those ancients who participated in these journeys reported that: 

they'd enter a state described as neither sleep nor waking -- and eventually they'd have a vision. Sometimes the vision or the dream would bring them face to face with the god or the goddess or hero, and that was how the healing came about. People were healed like this all the time. What's important is that you would do absolutely nothing. The point came when you wouldn't struggle or make an effort. You'd just have to surrender to your condition. 80.

He cites a passage by the ancient philosopher Strabo (c. 64 BC to AD 24) which describes just such a process of entering into deep trance, like an animal in hibernation or in a state that is neither ordinary sleep nor ordinary awareness.

Note the important insight that this deep state was achieved not by struggling after something external, but that it was actually within the individual already, if they would just "surrender." In one of the other quotations cited in the preceding post, Dr. Kingsley explains (on page 67) that the ancient inscriptions seem to indicate that "We already have everything we need to know, in the darkness inside ourselves. The longing is what turns us inside out until we find the sun and the moon and stars inside" (emphasis added: italics not present in the original).

In another significant discussion of this state, Dr. Kingsley says:

If you look at the old accounts of incubation you can still read the amazement as people discovered that the state they'd entered continued regardless of whether they were asleep or awake, whether they opened their eyes or shut them. Often you find the mention of a state that's like being awake but different from being awake, that's like sleep but not sleep: that's neither sleep nor waking. It's not the waking state, it's not an ordinary dream and it's not dreamless sleep. It's something else, something in between. 110-111.

In light of the clear evidence of the importance of this non-ordinary state, and in light of Peter Kingsley's explanation that this deep state was achieved not by struggling after something external, but that it was actually within the individual already, it is most intriguing to examine the passage in one of the letters attributed to Paul, in the New Testament book of 2 Corinthians chapter 12, in which he says:

1 It is not expedient for me doubtless to glory. I will come to visions and revelations of the Lord.

2 I knew a man in Christ above fourteen years ago, (whether in the body, I cannot tell; or whether out of the body, I cannot tell: God knoweth;) such an one caught up to the third heaven.

3 And I knew such a man, (whether in the body, or out of the body, I cannot tell: God knoweth;) 

4 How that he was caught up into paradise, and heard unspeakable words, which it is not lawful [margin note says "Or, possible"] for a man to utter.

Note the striking similarity here to the ancient descriptions of the trance-state from the tradition Peter Kingsley examines (a tradition of which the profound pre-Socratic philosopher Parmenides or Parmeneides was part) and the descriptions given by Paul of his own personal experience of something which certainly appears to be the same type of encounter: one is described as being a state that is "like being awake but different from being awake, that's like sleep but not sleep: that's neither sleep nor waking," and the other is described as a state in which it is impossible to determine whether one is "in the body or out of the body." In both cases, the participant has clearly entered a state which is completely different from ordinary experience, in which normal terms do not seem to apply and normal descriptions fail to capture the condition in which one finds himself or herself.

Note also that a sense of "amazement" appears to be present in the accounts cited by Peter Kingsley and the account as recorded in 2 Corinthians by Paul. Paul specifically says he knows it is "not expedient" for him to glory in this experience, but it was clearly an experience that was most incredible, the wonder of which Paul finds he can barely conceal or contain.

Finally, we can see in verse 2 that in this experience, Paul describes himself (speaking in the third person) as being "caught up" -- it is not something that he caused to happen, but something that just "took him," in much the same way that the participants were described as "surrendering" to the experience (rather than pursuing it or bringing it about by their own efforts) in the ancient texts and inscriptions Peter Kingsley cites.

In an important lecture given by Gerald Massey (1828 - 1907) entitled Paul, the Gnostic Opponent of Peter, not an Apostle of Historic Christianity, Massey seeks to establish that the author of most of what we find in the Pauline epistles of the New Testament was not teaching anything like literalistic Christianity, but rather that he vehemently opposed literalism and in fact taught something quite different.

The full structure of Massey's argument is beyond the scope of this particular post (the interested reader is advised to read the lecture linked above -- preferably several times -- which can also be obtained in published print format here), but Massey ascribes great importance to Paul's clear testimony that he experienced ecstatic trance, preserved for us in 2 Corinthians 12.

Of this ecstatic experience, Massey says in paragraph 24 (as numbered in this online version):

But, we have not yet completely mastered the entire Mystery of Paul for modern use; and it is not possible for any one but the phenomenal Spiritualist, who knows that the conditions of trance and clairvoyance are facts in nature; only those who have evidence that the other world can open and lighten with revelations, and prove its palpable presence, visibly and audibly; only those who accept the teaching that the human consciousness continues in death, and emerges in a personality that persists beyond the grave; only such, I say, are qualified to comprehend the mystery, or receive the message, once truly delivered to men by the Spiritualist Paul, but which was throughly perverted by the Sarkolators, the founders of the fleshly faith. [. . .] Paul, on his own testimony, was an abnormal Seer, subject to the conditions of trance. He could not remember if certain experiences occurred to him in the body or out of it! This trance condition was the origin and source of his revelations, the heart of his mystery, his infirmity in which he gloried -- in short, his "thorn in the flesh." He shows the Corinthians that his abnormal condition, ecstasy, illness, madness (or what not), was a phase of spiritual intercourse in which he was divinely insane -- insane on behalf of God -- but that he was rational enough in his relationship to them.

Note that in the above passage as it is found in almost every online transcription of the original lecture, the word "accept" in the long first sentence is erroneously written as "except" -- the printed text from 1922 linked above shows that this is someone's mistake (which has been duplicated several times on the web) and that the original printed text reads "accept" at that point, not "except." 

Note also that although Massey here uses the term "men" to refer to "humanity in general," he was absolutely not referring to "men as opposed to women." The reader will find that in this same lecture (particularly in paragraph 20) he explicitly acknowledges that what he is saying applies to men and women, and even goes so far as to explain that:

this manifestor of the re-birth might be feminine as well as masculine. In fact, the female announcer was first, and there are mystical reasons for this in nature. [. . .] Some of the Gnostic sects assigned the soul to the female nature, and made their Charis not only anterior, but superior, to the Christ. In the Book of Wisdom it is Sophia herself who is the pre-Christian Saviour of mankind. [. . .] This complete reversal of the Christian belief is to be found in the Hidden Wisdom!

Massey then goes on to make the extraordinary assertion, based upon the phrasing in verse 2, that this condition of ecstasy is what Paul describes as being "in Christ"! Massey writes:

And when Paul says, "I knew a man in Christ," we see that to be in Christ is to be in the condition of trance, in the spirit, as they phrased it, in the state that is common to what is now termed mediumship.

Massey also argues that those who find themselves in "this same spirit" will manifest it in "various spirit manifestations," and that the list Paul gives in 1 Corinthians 12:7-12 is a list of the different manifestations of entering into contact with the realm of spirit (paragraph 26).

Those who are shocked by Massey's arguments, and the basis he finds for his arguments in the New Testament letters themselves, will doubtless point to passages in those same letters, or in other New Testament letters attributed to Paul, which appear to teach the doctrines of literalist or "historic" Christianity (namely, the coming of a literal individual Christ in history, rather than the teaching Massey is asserting that Paul maintained, of a Christ within that was not external or historical). 

But, as Massey points out, Paul himself cautions the readers of his letters that there are those who seek to subvert what Paul is teaching, and who are not above forging letters in Paul's own name in order to suppress Paul's gnostic and spiritual teaching! The second verse of 2 Thessalonians warns the recipients not to be "shaken in mind" or "troubled" even if they hear deceptive reports or even if they receive such reports in a "letter as from us" -- indicating an awareness that adversaries would not be above inserting different teachings into letters actually penned by Paul, or into letters falsely claiming to be from the hand of Paul.

He also makes the insightful point that, since we can clearly find passages today in the New Testament's Pauline epistles which are completely gnostic and anti-literalist, and other passages which are clearly literalist and anti-gnostic, it is far more likely that the literalist doctrines were inserted by literalists than that the gnostic passages were snuck in by gnostics (paragraph 17). 

For one thing, the faction that clearly won out was the literalists, who crushed out virtually all of the gnostic teachers and outlawed their writings (on pain of death for any caught in possession of them) during the second through fourth centuries, and so it is probably they who introduced alterations as they saw necessary to letters which had originally been anti-literalist.   

For another, he points out that many of the "founders of the Fleshly Faith" did not really understand the gnostic teachings, and thus it is far more likely that the literalists added passages and even entire letters supporting literalism, while failing to perceive the full extent of the gnostic teaching that remained, than that the opposite scenario took place.

The striking thing to notice is that we here find very powerful evidence that the same kind of "ancient wisdom" which Peter Kingsley finds in operation during the time of Parmenides (and his long line of predecessors and successors, before such knowledge was somehow subverted and stamped out). And we find that, just as Dr. Kingsley asserts took place with the ancient knowledge that inspired Parmenides and other ancient lovers of wisdom, the teachings of Paul were co-opted and subverted and made to appear to be part of a very different tradition -- one that basically teaches the very opposite of what Paul actually taught!

And there is still more.

Because, as Peter Kingsley makes clear, the ancient tradition of which Parmeneides was a part, and the practice of going deep into an altered state to make contact with the divine spiritual force, was closely associated with the god Apollo, whom we know of as a solar god but who was also associated with the underworld (where the sun appears to spend half its time) and with crossing the boundary into the non-ordinary realm in order to obtain prophetic messages in the trance state, as at Apollo's temple at Delphi. For the discussion from In the Dark Places of Wisdom of the mysterious god Apollo, who has also been "rationalized" and depicted today as something much less than what he was in antiquity, see especially pages 77 - 82.

In fact, in three important inscriptions which were discovered during the twentieth century at the side of ancient Elea (or Velia) and which feature prominently in the mystery-story that Peter Kingsley explores in his text, the three persons commemorated take for their own name one of the names of Apollo himself: Oulis. 

Peter Kingsley writes:

Oulis was the name of someone dedicated to the god Apollo -- to Apollo Oulios as he was sometimes called. 

Apollo Oulis had his own special areas of worship, mainly in the western coastal regions of Anatolia. And as for the title Oulios, it contains a delightful ambiguity. Originally it meant 'deadly,' 'destructive,' 'cruel': every god has his destructive side. But the Greeks explained it another way, as meaning 'he who makes whole.' That, in a word, is Apollo -- the destroyer who heals, the healer who destroys.

If it was just a matter of a single person called Oulis you couldn't draw too many conclusions. But a string of three inscriptions all starting with the same name, this name, isn't a coincidence; and the way each of the men is referred to as Oulis makes one thing very plain. As the first people who published the texts already saw, these were men connected with Apollo not on a casual basis but systematically -- from generation to generation. 57.

Now what is absolutely stunning about all of this, in light of the connections we have just seen from the writings of the New Testament epistles of Paul, is the fact that Paul himself carries a name which refers to the god Apollo!

This is something that the mighty explicator of the celestial foundations of the Bible, Robert Taylor (1784 - 1844) makes quite clear in some of his lectures (which were also published posthumously). The tradition is that this author we call "Paul" was originally known as . . . "Saul"! And of course, as Robert Taylor points out, that word is pronounced just as the word "sol" is pronounced -- the very word that means "Sun" in Latin but which also can be found in the Hebrew Old Testament of course, not only in the character named Saul but also Solomon -- while his new name "Paul" is cognate with the "pol" that is found in both "Apollo" and "Pollux."

And so here we have a rather textbook example if ever there was one which fits the description from the passage just quoted out of Kingsley's In the Dark Places of Wisdom: "these were men connected with Apollo not on a casual basis but systematically -- from generation to generation."

Paul appears to have been part of that systematic, generational line preserving the ancient knowledge.

Which means that it didn't die out with the arrival of Plato or the Platonic school.

But it certainly appears to have come under heavy fire during the period from AD 100 through AD 500, when the literalists crushed out the gnostics and their teachings, so that their work had to go underground for the next seventeen or more centuries.

And note as well that, just as Dr. Kingsley's thesis argues in regards to the suppression of the ancient wisdom known to Parmeneides but later forgotten, those who suppressed this wisdom point to solutions that must be pursued externally to the individual, as opposed to the teaching that we are actually already in deep mystical connection with the divine, if we only learn how to "surrender" to it or be "caught up" by it.

There is much more that could be drawn out from further study of In the Dark Places of Wisdom in conjunction with Massey's enlightening lecture from nearly a hundred years before. But perhaps one of the most important is an almost-offhand remark which Massey includes at the end of paragraph 26 in his lecture. 

There, he says that this destruction of the true teaching which Paul was so zealous to try to pass on to his followers, and its replacement with "historical Christianity," has been "the greatest of all obstacles to mental development and the unity of the human race."

Several previous posts have discussed the reasons that a literalistic interpretation tends to divide men and women from one another -- and to divide them from nature, and even to divide them from themselves and from their true source of "stillness" and satisfaction, so that they must run after it elsewhere, futilely, in an endless cycle of frustration.

The horrible results can still be clearly seen today.

For this reason, it is absolutely essential that we take these matters to heart. 

Please share this information with as many people as you believe might find it to be beneficial.

Peace and blessings.

"The peace of utter stillness . . ."

image: Ruins of the temple of Asclepius, Elea. Wikimedia commons (link).

Special thanks to a reader who recently introduced me to the work of Peter Kingsley, with whom I had previously been unfamiliar. 

I have now read one of Dr. Kingsley's four books, In the Dark Places of Wisdom (1999), which can accurately be described as "momentous in its implications" (in the words one prominent author has used to describe Dr. Kingsley's work).

The momentousness of the implications comes from Dr. Kingsley's discovery that something has been stolen from the culture that we today know as "the West" -- something so essential, that it is in fact the very thing which we each long for in our lives, and which we can wear ourselves out in pursuing and never reaching. 

In the Dark Places of Wisdom describes the problem:

And here's a great secret: we all have that vast missingness deep inside us [. . .] the more we feel that nothingness inside us, the more we feel the need to fill the void. So we try to substitute this and that, but nothing lasts. We keep wanting something else, needing some other need to keep us going [. . .]. 34-35.

Because of what has been stolen in antiquity, he argues, western culture has become "a past master at the art of substitution," but "It offers and never delivers because it can't. It has lost the power even to know what needs to be delivered, so it offers substitutes instead" (35). 

What we are seeking is described by Dr. Kingsley at one point as "the peace of utter stillness" (36), and of course we can never find this by rushing after it, searching for it everywhere -- but ironically there is a way in which it is accessible to every one of us, at all times.

According to his thesis, the knowledge of how to access "the peace of utter stillness" still exists in places outside of western culture, and because of this many moderns have assumed that such knowledge "never took root in the West" (115). "But," he says, "that's not the case." In fact, this knowledge was once at the heart of western culture -- and may indeed lie at the heart of its greatest ancient achievements. It's just that it has been covered over by what may be described as "a conspiracy of silence" (230).

He implies that the blame lies with the invention of a new definition of philosophy, in Athens, under Plato. Plato, the book argues, could almost be seen as a "parricide," who inherited the great ancient wisdom and then betrayed it -- metaphorically speaking, killing his own father. 

And the "father" that Platonic philosophy killed, Kingsley argues, was represented by an actual historical figure, one whose name has survived to this day: Parmenides of Elea.

Based upon new archaeological discoveries of marbles and inscriptions which had lain forgotten at the site of ancient Elea (or Velia, as it was also known and as it is spelled throughout In the Dark Places of Wisdom), along with the body of what had already been known about Parmenides (including the surviving fragments of his own writings), Peter Kingsley shows the reader that Parmenides came from an ancient line of wisdom-lovers who practiced the technique of achieving that "utter stillness" through the entry of a state of consciousness "described as neither sleep nor waking," in which they made contact with "another level of awareness and another level of being" (80).

In other words, Peter Kingsley has found yet another incredibly important line of evidence which demonstrates that what we today describe as "shamanic" (a word which he uses in the book) is in fact the shared inheritance of all humanity -- not least of all that portion which would later come to be known as "the West" -- but that in western culture this inheritance has somehow been lost, or stolen. 

The details are amazing and fascinating, and deserve to be read in their entirety in the book itself. Below are just a few noteworthy quotations, many of which appear to resonate very strongly with material that has been presented in this blog and in my 2014 book The Undying Stars, where similar conclusions have been reached based upon other sources of evidence -- which is just what we might expect to find, if in fact something like the loss posited in In the Dark Places of Wisdom has indeed taken place in western culture (due to font limitations, some diacritical markings over vowels, present in the original quotations, are not included here):

• "Always we want to learn from outside, from absorbing other people's knowledge. It's safer that way. The trouble is that it's always other people's knowledge. We already have everything we need to know, in the darkness inside ourselves. The longing is what turns us inside out until we find the sun and the moon and the stars inside" (67).
• "And the fact is that Parmenides never describes himself as traveling out of darkness into the light. When you follow what he says you see he was going in exactly the opposite direction" (51).
• "The underworld isn't just a place of darkness and death. It only seems like that from a distance. In reality it's the supreme place of paradox where all the opposites meet. Right at the roots of western as well as eastern mythology there's the idea that the sun comes out of the underworld and goes back to the underworld every night. It belongs in the underworld. That's where it has its home; where its children come from. The source of light is at home in the darkness" (68).
• "There used to be experts at incubation -- masters at the art of going into another state of consciousness or allowing themselves to go if they were drawn there. Sometimes they did this for the sake of healing others, but the point of incubation wasn't really the healing at all. That's simply how it seemed. What was most important was the fact that the healing comes from another level of being, from somewhere else. For these were people who were able to enter another world, make contact with the divine receive knowledge directly from the gods" (101-102). 
• "The purpose was to free people's attention from distractions, to turn it in another direction so their awareness could start operating in an entirely different way. The stillness had a point to it, and that was to create an opening into a world unlike anything we're used to: a world that can only be entered 'in deep meditation, ecstasies and dreams'" (181).
• "Ancient Greek accounts of incubation repeatedly mention certain signs that mark the point of entry into another world: into another state of awareness that's neither waking nor sleep. One of the sings is that you become aware of a rapid spinning movement. Another is that you hear the powerful vibration produced by a piping, whistling hissing sound." In India exactly the same signs are described as the prelude to entering samadhi, the state beyond sleep and waking. And they're directly related to the process known as the awakening of kundalini -- of the 'serpent power' that's the basic energy in all creation but that's almost completely asleep in human beings. When it starts waking up it makes a hissing sound" (128).
• "The recipe is strictly esoteric, only for transmission from a spiritual 'father' to his adopted 'son'" (129).
• "For us a song and a road are very different things. But in the language of ancient Greek epic poetry the word for 'road' and the word for 'song,' oimos and oime, are almost identical. They're linked, have the same origin. Originally the poet's song was quite simply a journey into another world: a world where the past and future are as accessible and real as the present. And his journey was his song. Those were the times when the poet was a magician, a shaman. [. . .] The words shamans use as they enter the state of ecstasy evoke the things they speak about. The poems they sing don't only describe their journeys; they're what makes the journeys happen. And shamans have always used repetition as a matter of course to invoke a consciousness quite different from our ordinary awareness: a consciousness where something else starts to take over. The repetition is what draws them into another world, away from all the things we know" (122 - 123).

Each of these quotations deserves careful and deep consideration. As does the entire book, and the message it is trying to tell us.

It is fascinating to note that in this ancient tradition of which Parmenides (or Parmeneides) was part, the entry into the condition of being "beyond sleep and waking" was understood to be essential for the "fields" of both healing and of properly ordering society and human activity. This same connection is also found in shamanic cultures around the world, and we have also seen that it appears to have been a central feature of the Therapeutae of the ancient world, discussed in this previous post.

Regarding the thesis that it was Plato (and the mindset of Athens in general) who is responsible for the loss of this ancient wisdom, I would say that it is very clear that Plato himself gives hints that his writing  (and especially his "story-form" writing) is not meant to be understood literally -- that Plato's writing is itself esoteric in nature -- and Peter Kingsley acknowledges that in this book.  

Indeed, he provides many quotations from Plato which indicate that Plato as well believed that the rules for ordering society had to come from the realm of the gods (and specifically from Apollo, who is not only the god of the sun but also of music, of healing, and of laws for the proper ordering of society and one's own life), which seems to undermine the argument that Plato or the Platonic school turned philosophy into an exercise in dead and dry "ratiocination" (to use a 19th-century term) rather than one of ecstatic travel into non-ordinary reality.

And, as I have explored previously, there is an important exchange in the dialogue known as the Phaedrus in which Plato has Socrates point to the temple at Delphi -- the most important oracle in the ancient world, and the place in which the priestess (the Pythia) would "cross over" into that same realm "beyond sleep and waking" in order to receive information directly from the divine (in this case, of course, from Apollo, whose importance is powerfully and insightfully explored throughout In the Dark Places of Wisdom). 

And so I am not so sure that Plato was actually the culprit.

I personally believe that there is strong evidence to support the conclusion that the actual forces that sought to destroy the esoteric and "shamanic" elements at the heart of what would come to be called "western culture" were not the Platonists but rather the creators of literalist Christianity, who spent the years that we (and they) designate as the second and third centuries AD vehemently opposing esoteric interpretations of the scriptures that they held sacred, and especially the various different schools and groups known as the Gnostics, and who eventually maneuvered into the capitol of the Roman Empire itself -- whereupon, during the reign of the emperor Theodosius, they extinguished both the Eleusinian Mysteries and the Oracle at Delphi.

Nevertheless, I am in complete agreement with Dr. Kingsley regarding the answer to the "vast missingness deep inside us," and the fact that we are all designed for and capable of "the peace of utter stillness," and that in fact we are in contact with this infinite stillness of the divine realm at all times, and we can access it through a nearly infinite variety of different techniques of ecstasy.

I am also in agreement that this ability to journey to the hidden realm is part of the ancient heritage of all humanity -- of the "western" part as well -- but that in the West it has been stolen, and suppressed, for well over a thousand years and nearly for two thousand.

This knowledge cannot be hidden forever. It is right there, in each of us, ready to be found.

Many thanks to Peter Kingsley for his work in revealing an incredibly important part of this story, and to Mr. J____ for pointing me to it.

a few additional previous posts with some resonance to the subjects discussed above include:

• "Your song"
• "Buddha bless you"
• "The shamanic journey described in the Pyramid Texts"
• "The horizon and the scales of judgement"

The celestial fire

image: Wikimedia commons (link).

The Bibles of antiquity have but one theme: the incarnation. The vast body of ancient Scripture discoursed on but one subject -- the descent of souls, units of deific Mind, sons of God, into fleshly bodies developed by natural evolution on planets such as ours, therein to undergo an experience by which their continued growth through the ranges and planes of expanding consciousness might be carried forward to ever higher grades of divine being.    

-- Alvin Boyd Kuhn,

Esoteric Structure of the Alphabet and Its Hidden Mystical Language. 20.

The world today is pausing to honor the life and work of Leonard Nimoy.

He is of course most closely associated with the character of Spock in the series Star Trek, a series which depicted travel across the stars but which was certainly no less concerned with the exploration of the human condition.

He is also inextricably connected with the concept and act of blessing. 

Blessing can be accurately said to be an essential part of his identity, one with which he is universally identified and remembered. 

The outpouring of response today to the news that Leonard Nimoy has sprung the bonds of earth to again be among the stars from which we all came has overwhelmingly referenced his blessing "Live long and prosper," which was delivered with his intrinsic dignity and sincerity and accompanied by the famous hand gesture which he introduced during the first season of Star Trek.

It is no secret that this hand gesture represents the Hebrew letter shin and that it has profound connection to the sacred act of blessing -- which has previously been argued within these pages to be the act of evoking the divine spirit which dwells in each being in the universe and indeed which infuses every aspect of the universe itself at all times and at every point.

Mr. Nimoy on many occasions related the story of the deep impression that the act of ritual blessing made upon him as a child, during which this hand gesture was extended as part of the invocation of the divine and the ceremony of blessing (see for example this video clip showing one such explanation he gave).

In seeking to understand more fully this benevolent or beneficent side of Leonard Nimoy -- this profound association with the act of blessing, which he connected to this particular hand gesture embodying this important letter shin and the expression "Live Long and Prosper" -- let us briefly explore just a few important aspects of this symbol.

In the relatively short treatise entitled The Esoteric Structure of the Alphabet and Its Hidden Mystical Language, Alvin Boyd Kuhn (1880 - 1963) says of alphabets that:

along with every other symbolic device of ancient meaning-form, even the alphabet embodied the central structure of all ancient literature, -- the incarnation, the baptism of the fire-soul in and under body-water. [. . .] The celestial fire emanated from primal source as one ray, but soon radiated out in triadic division, and finally reached the deepest heart of matter in a sevenfold segmentation. But in its first stage of emanation it was always pictured as triform. The YOD candle-flame being its type-form, the Hebrews constructed their letter which was to represent the fire-principle with three YODS at the top level, with lines extending downward to a base, on which all three met and were conjoined in one essence. This gives us the great fire-letter SH, shin, -- ש

21-22.

Kuhn then demonstrates that this letter is used in the Hebrew word for fire itself, which is esh but which he asserts on a linguistic basis is also related to AeSH and ISH, with ish being the word for "man, who embodies this single, double and triple fire" (22). The word ash, he notes, is the byproduct of fire in English, but also the great tree of life Ygdrasil in Norse mythology, the very tree upon which Odin had to hang in order to obtain the symbolic technology of writing, as well as the tree from which mankind was originally fashioned, according to some expressions of Norse myth (the reader may remember that in the past we have addressed the fact that Kuhn, writing in the early part of the 20th century, often used the terms "man" and "mankind" but explicitly stated throughout his writings that what he said applies to both men and women, and that we should not assume that he intended to refer to "men" when he used the term "mankind").

Going further with the significance of the letter shin, Kuhn explains that the Hebrew word for the sun, shemesh, also embodies the concept of spirit-fire plunging down into incarnate water and then rising back to the realm of spirit:

As a globe of fire its nature would be expressed most fittingly by the letter shin (SH), with its threefold candle flame, the three YODS, above; the place of water into which it nightly descends would be indicated by M, and the place of its final return, the empyrean above, by SH again. So the word thus constituted would turn out to be SH-M-SH (shemesh); and this is just what it is. It is the old basic story of divine fire plunging down into water, the universal trope figure under which all operation of spirit in and upon matter was dramatized. 30.

From the foregoing discussion, we can begin to understand why extending one's arm and hand with the form of the Hebrew letter shin, representative of the divine threefold fire which is plunged down into incarnation, can be a gesture of blessing: it is a reminder not to forget the divine fire within, our origin among the empyrean of the stars -- the spirit plane -- and it is a blessing that seeks to elevate the invisible spirit in each of us and in all creation itself, along with all the positive aspects connected to our "higher nature" (the opposite of cursing, which seeks to put the spirit down, to degrade others and make them less in touch with spirit and more under the control of matter and the "lower nature").

Elaborating upon the same line of argument, Kuhn says:

As a symbol designed to depict the immersion of fiery spiritual units of consciousness in their actual baptism in the water of physical bodies, the letter form that dramatizes the actual event, and the letter sound that onomatapoetically mimics the sound of fire plunging into water, this alphabet character shin is certainly most eloquently suggestive. 34.

And here we can begin to draw our analysis back to the well-beloved character whom Leonard Nimoy brought so memorably to life and whose expressions of blessing have become so powerful to a world in such great need of blessing. For Mr. Spock, of course, was a Vulcan, from the planet Vulcan -- named expressly and explicitly for the god of fire: Vulcan, known to the Greeks as Hephaestos (and who, by the way, was not only the god of fire but was also cast down to earth at one point by Zeus).

Coincidence? 

Not likely. Perhaps a manifestation of the benevolent synchronicity operating within a conscious universe, but such a connection between the hand gesture now so inextricably associated with Mr. Spock and the planet for whom his very people are named can hardly be written off as meaningless.

And, we can go even further. For, as countless previous posts have explained, the concept of the plunge into incarnation was represented in ancient Egyptian myth by the casting down of the Djed column -- where the divine spark was submerged in matter, forgotten and hidden. A major part of our work in this incarnate life was seen to be the raising up of the Djed column, which is to say the remembrance of the divine fire, the reconnection and elevation of the spirit and the elevation of the "higher aspects and impulses" of our being -- in short, all the calling forth of benevolent spirit associated with the concept of blessing!

Now, one whole series of previous posts explored the fact that the ancient Egyptian Cross of Life, the ANKH, was absolutely symbolic of this idea of raising the Djed column, elevating the spirit, and blessing (and, in fact, ancient Ankhs were often depicted as incorporating the symbolism of the Djed column in their vertical pillar). See for example "Scarab, Ankh and Djed." 

This same vitally-important symbolism of the raising of the Djed column can be seen operating in both the Old and New Testaments, in the symbol of the cross in the New Testament, for example, and of the lifting up of the brasen serpent by Moses upon a staff in the Old Testament. 

Now, you may have caught the fact that the Ankh-Cross itself was a symbol of life, a symbol of the giving of life, and thus a powerful symbol of blessing. This connects directly to the words of blessing which Spock -- and Leonard Nimoy -- would pronounce and with which he is so closely connected: "

Live long and prosper."

Two previous posts have explored at some length the amazing number of words which Alvin Boyd Kuhn believed could be linguistically and conceptually related to this powerful concept through the root sound of the ancient word Ankh -- see "The Name of the Ankh" and "The Name of the Ankh Continued: Kundalini around the world."

Now, what would happen if we combine the fire-symbol of the letter shin with the word Ankh itself? Alvin Boyd Kuhn has anticipated just such a question, and in fact he refers back to the earlier independent scholar Gerald Massey (1828 - 1907), who apparently also explored this avenue of thought:

Massey traces even the great name of mystery, the sphinx, from this ANKH stem, preceded by the demonstrative adjective P (this, the, that) and the starting S, thus: S-P-ANKH. Massey was well versed in the abstrusities of the hieroglyphics and his surmise on this is as good as that of others. The word thus composed would mean "the beginning of the process of linking spirit and matter," which indeed is the sphinx-riddle of the creation. The sphinx image does conjoin the head of man, spirit, with the body of the animal, lion, representing matter. It is precisely such values and realities that the sages of antiquity dealt with and in precisely this manner of subtle indirection. When will modern scholarship come to terms with this recognition! 38.

Now, this line of argument is most incredible, because in the above passage we practically have the name of Spock himself. Look at the term S-P-ANKH which Kuhn, following Massey, argues to be the linguistic and symbolic and esoteric origin of the word sphinx , and you will immediately perceive that if we emphasize the "velar fricative" sound of the KH (which became the voiceless velar fricative sound indicated by the letter "x" in the word sphinx) it will automatically de-emphasize the preceding sound of the "n" and give us rather directly the name of Spock!

Now, this is a rather incredible development, and the reader can be excused for exclaiming at this point that there is just no way that they were thinking of the esoteric origins of the word sphinx and S-P-ANKH when they came up with the character-name Spock!

And yet, we do not have to argue that "they" were thinking along these lines at all -- it might have been "the universe" that created this unbelievable synchronicity, independent of conscious human awareness, acting through creative human conduits.

But, it is most remarkable to note that one of the other extremely distinctive characteristics of Mr. Spock in the Star Trek series is his constant effort to present a dignified expression of calm, composed gravitas, almost never showing emotion and especially not grinning or laughing or smiling (except on very rare occasions): what can only be described as a most sphinx-like characteristic!

And so, we see that Leonard Nimoy and his blessing-speaking character Mr. Spock connect with us on a profound level, and impart to us wisdom which stretches back to a very ancient source. 

When Mr. Nimoy held up his hand in that symbol of shin, he was blessing. He was silently saying (if I may paraphrase, or interpret the symbolic content discussed above): "You are divine fire -- you have an inner spark -- you, and everyone you meet, contain this spirit-fire submerged in water, so to speak, plunged into matter, but you must not forget where you come from -- you come in a real sense from the stars -- you come from the realm of spirit, and you can remember that and elevate that -- Blessings."

It is an expression of reminder, of recognition, of elevation of the spirit and consciousness, and of blessing which is very much analogous to the gesture and greeting contained in Namaste.

And now, Leonard Nimoy has crossed over this plunge into water, this crossing of the Red Sea which is symbolic of our incarnation in this body. He has left us with these benevolent and beneficent blessings and teachings, beautifully and elegantly expressed. And he goes to be among the stars, the realm the ancient wisdom teachings of the world depicted as the realm of the stars.

We can all agree that he will not find that journey to be one with which he is unfamiliar or for which he is unprepared.

Peace and blessings.